EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Banks and Henry and next week's Chelsea Flower Show
MUCH OF EXPLORATION consisted of colonisation or the suppression – in many cases annihilation – of native peoples. But beyond the greed and cruelty was genuine scientific curiosity. One of the most heroic of 18th-century scientists was Sir Joseph Banks, the generous pioneering genius of modern plant collecting and – most specifically – discovery and identification.
True, he was very wealthy and had the resources to pursue his many interests. Born into Lincolnshire landed gentry in London in 1743, he was a product of an age in which the aristocracy virtually controlled the political and economic life of Britain, never mind society. Banks had privilege yet he never abused it. Discovering the natural world at an early age, by 13 he realised botany was his passion. On entering Christ Church College Oxford, where the then-professor of botany had a cavalier attitude towards arriving for lectures, Banks hired a gifted tutor to help him and his fellow students. He duly secured an honours degree. At the age of 21 he became one of the richest young men in Britain. Instead of embarking on the ritual Grand Tour of classical Italy, Banks set off in 1766 as a working naturalist on a two-year fisheries project, surveying the Labrador and Newfoundland coastlines. He returned with a collection of dried and pressed specimens that would attract international attention and are currently to be seen in their original mahogany cases in the British Museum of Natural History. He next paid £10,000 for himself and a nine-man team to join Captain James Cook’s 1768-1771 expedition to the South Seas aboard the Endeavour.
Cook, however, often interfered with the plant-hunting, so many trips were made by stealth. Banks’s tenacity paid off and, in South America, despite difficult diplomatic conditions, he gathered 316 types of plants including passion flowers. In Tahiti the natives proved a distraction. The warlike Maoris of New Zealand were openly hostile, yet Banks collected 40 new species including what has become a stalwart of gardens everywhere – New Zealand flax. Cook is more famous than Banks now, but when the Endeavour returned to England, Banks was celebrated for having catalogued 1,300 new species – he did not, however, return with seeds. It was Banks who established Kew Gardens as the world’s major botanical centre, ultimately introducing about 7,000 new species.
Irishman Augustine Henry was born in 1857, 37 years after the death of Banks. Henry qualified as a medical doctor and, having learned Chinese, joined the customs service and was initially stationed in Shanghai. His dedication to botany was to inspire his first collection of 1,000 plants from inland China which he dispatched to Kew. By collecting seeds and bulbs he introduced many Chinese plants to Europe. He was appointed professor of forestry at the College of Science in Dublin in 1913, the year of the first Chelsea Flower Show, which opens next week.
Henry, who died in Dublin in 1930, is another of botany’s abiding heroes, having collected some 158,050 dried specimens of some of the world’s richest flora.